Edward Meyer; built advertising empire; at 96

Edward H. Meyer, an empirebuilding CEO who, using an iron-willed management style and a laser focus on even the smallest details, transformed a midsize New York advertising agency into the global power known as Grey Group, died Tuesday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by a Grey spokesperson.

Mr. Meyer joined Grey Advertising, as it was then known, as an account-services executive in 1956, when the agency was billing about $34 million a year.

He was named president in 1968 and assumed the reins as chair and CEO in 1970. Over the next 35 years, he built Grey, one of the last major agencies to remain independent, into a behemoth that a company spokesperson said was billing $4.2 billion at the time of its sale to British advertising and communications colossus WPP in 2005 for $1.5 billion.

As a manager, Mr. Meyer was anything but passive. Demanding performance at all levels, he had an uncompromising drive that inspired comparisons to corporate barons such as Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone.

“Ed inspires awe in staffers of every rank,” a 2003 profile in Adweek noted. “He also inspires fear.” The article quoted a former Grey middle manager who said that employees would often go silent the second Mr. Meyer stepped into an elevator and that some would visibly tremble outside his office before meetings.

While gracious and often incisively witty in interviews, Mr. Meyer did not duck such characterizations. “I just tend to think I’m not benevolent,” he told Adweek. “But everybody says, ‘Boy, he admires brains, he loves people who get it done. If you can match those criteria, you’ve got it made at Grey.’ ”